Your open graph data determines the link preview shown on social media.

I hate it when I launch a new website and share it online only to find out that the title isn’t set properly and it’s just pulling in a random image from the page. You can fix this by setting the correct Open Graph (OG) data right inside WordPress— it’s easy!

Look great on social media

Social media is a great way to drive traffic to your website, but when you share a link, you’ll want it to look like a great page to visit. You can do this by setting appropriate titles, descriptions, and (most importantly) the right image.

This is done by setting the correct open graph data, which we’ll cover below.

Setting your open graph data

Most SEO plugins come with this functionality, which you can see here as shown in the SEOPress plugin:

Here you can enter the data you want to be shared on Facebook. This is the most important section as most social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter) will adopt the Facebook settings if their own aren’t present.

The ideal ratio for your image is 1.91:1, but keep in mind that when your URL is shared in comments it will be shown in a 1:1 ratio so try to keep any vital information inside of a square in the middle of your image.

By default, social media will take your default page title and featured image if open graph data is not set. If there is no open graph data, and no featured image, typically the first image on your webpage will be used.

Using the Facebook Debugger tool

To test what your page(s) will look like when shared on Facebook you can use the Facebook Debugger tool.

You’ll need to be logged into Facebook first, then visit the Sharing Debugger.

Pop your URL into the search field, and hit the ‘debug’ button.

In the next screen you’ll see the results of your test, including the Link Preview.

Here you’ll see the image, title, and description Facebook will show when previewing a link to your website. In the example above, we set all those things manually using our SEO plugin.

Note: If you’re not seeing the changes you made reflected in the Facebook debugger tool, sometimes you have to hit the “scrape again” button 2 or 3 times to get Facebook to manually fetch new information. Also, make sure that you clear your cache after you make any changes.